Titus Groan · Gormenghast · Titus Alone
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
CD 1 1 Titus is seven. 7:15 2 The Countess walked with a frown on her brow... 5:53 3 Cora and Clarice, although they did not know… 6:49 4 The husky, whispering sound of a score of flying gowns... 6:31 5 He beat his fist into the palm of his other hand. 6:34 6 When Titus awoke the walls of the cave were leaping... 5:41 7 Titus was to be kept in the lichen fort for a week. 4:08 8 There was no sound in all Gormenghast... 7:49 9 It was on the following afternoon that Mrs Slagg died. 7:45 10 A few days later when Steerpike saw Fuschia emerge... 3:52 11 At the end of the three hours that lay before him... 3:42 12 Steerpike’s return to the castle’s heart was rapid... 6:04 13 It was then that there was a knock at the door. 6:26 2 CD 2 14 At the same time Steerpike was fighting to free himself... 4:54 15 When Steerpike had come out of his faint... 6:42 16 Mr Flay had been sitting for over an hour... 7:50 17 In January the snow came down. 7:47 18 While Flay in his wilderness of hollow halls was brooding... 7:15 19 Dr Prunesquallor sank back on the couch by the window... 5:15 20 The Doctor had told the Countess... 6:32 21 She turned on her heel... 5:17 22 When Flay heard the door open quietly below him... 5:31 23 And so, without a moment to lose... 5:38 24 It was lucky for Titus that when the Doctor started... 5:56 25 When at last Steerpike came to a certain door... 6:24 26 When Flay and the Doctor, in their different ways... 3:33 3 CD 3 27 What he did not realise was that the death... 4:54 28 A few days after the murder of Mr Flay... 6:53 29 The day of the Bright Carvings was at hand. 6:19 30 Then he began to run... 4:48 31 It was hunger that finally woke him. 7:09 32 All of a sudden, Titus knew that he was lying alone... 5:24 33 There was no one alive in Gormenghast who could remember... 5:27 34 For little short of a fortnight the rain continued... 5:08 35 Driven from haunt to haunt... 6:10 36 It was not that Fuschia did not struggle... 3:33 37 Now that the flood had reached its height... 4:48 38 He was altogether exhausted... 4:33 4 CD 4 39 Knowing that he had several hours to wait... 9:46 40 The unwitting pageantry of the lantern-lit boats... 7:31 41 Titus, as the minutes had passed... 5:28 42 Nevertheless, the time came when the boatman... 6:09 43 When she turned her eye back... 6:30 44 All at once there was a terrible cry from below... 5:54 45 The boats moved out with much splashing of oars... 6:37 46 Ignoring all precautions, he wrenched the boughs about him... 4:55 47 When Titus saw that this was indeed so... 3:31 48 There was no more rain. 5:51 49 One evening in the late spring... 5:34 Total time: 4:50:29 5 Mervyn Peake (1911–1968) Titus Groan · Gormenghast · Titus Alone The Gormenghast trilogy (as Titus Groan, his early years in China before returning Gormenghast and Titus Alone are slightly to England to complete his education inaccurately known) seems at first sight in 1923. Tracing specific influences is out of step with its times. The first bound to lead to conjecture, but his volume was published in 1946, when a imagination was certainly stirred by the numbed Britain was greyly austere, still in architecture and the unquiet society of shock and just beginning to learn some China at the time, and his first published of the broader horrors of the War: the story was written when he was 10 for devastating implications of the atom the Missionary Society’s magazine. bomb were almost overwhelmed by the Passionate, unconventional, romantic emerging atrocities of the Holocaust. and almost in some senses wild, he had Titus Groan, a grimly comic, fantastical, worn a cape, an earring and his hair Gothic tale, was surely just an escapist long in the early ’30s when he was work, a kind of dark relief. But while pursuing his first love (art) and his second the imaginary world it so completely (poetry). Despite his evident skills he was describes is essentially self-contained undisciplined almost on principle, and (rather than echoing the concerns of after failing the necessary exams at the Britain in the ’40s), Peake had more claim Royal Academy Schools he moved to the than most to an understanding of the Channel Island of Sark, where a former evils in the real one. He had been a war tutor had established an artists’ colony. His artist at the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. work was exhibited there and in London, He had also suffered the first of where in 1935 he returned and began two nervous breakdowns, and was by teaching at the Westminster School of temperament slightly otherworldly. He Art. He met Maeve Gilmore on her first was the son of missionaries - his father day as a student there and they married a doctor, his mother a nurse - and spent the following year. By the end of 1940 6 he had had a one-man show in London, poetry, and finishing Titus Groan. illustrated a collection of children’s verse, He and his family went to live in written and illustrated a children’s book, Sark in 1946 (the year of Titus Groan’s had a son, moved to Sussex, and begun publication), in the house previously the writing of Titus Groan. occupied by the Commandant of the He had also joined the Royal German occupying force; but financial Artillery, although he was a good deal constraints forced them back to the UK more interested in becoming a war artist. in 1950, where Peake taught, illustrated, His several applications to become one published Gormenghast, and wrote a were turned down in part because it was comic novel (Mr Pye) and several plays. suspected that he might be applying in But the plays were not the financial order to get out of the Army. It would not winners he had hoped for, and he be an unseemly speculation to suggest suffered another nervous breakdown that this was correct; but his mental state in 1957. This led to the more evident was such that he was invalided out of the display of the symptoms of a type of Army anyway after a nervous breakdown Parkinson’s Disease which, alongside the in 1943. effects of encephalitis lethargica that he After six months’ recovery, he was contracted in childhood, was slowly to finally taken on as a war artist, and at kill him over more than a decade. the end of the War witnessed Nazi trials In 1956 he wrote Boy in Darkness, as well as the previously unimaginable a short horror story about Titus (although concentration camps. As an artist he had the name is not mentioned in the book), always been attracted to the macabre, and in 1959 Titus Alone was published. but this actual horror changed him By now, however, Peake was hardly able deeply. His wife said that he became to write, and Titus Alone was incomplete ‘quieter, more inward looking, as if he on publication. Later editions were had lost his confidence in life itself’. His corrected by his widow and the writer other work during the War included Langdon Jones. Preparatory notes for a illustrating The Hunting of the Snark, further volume (Titus Awakes) were also The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and discovered among his many papers after Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, writing more his death. 7 Gormenghast This second book in the series starts with This second novel increases the Titus at seven, and finishes with him at incident and surprise (of both delight 17. Inside Gormenghast, the old ways and tragedy) without losing any of the are facing a threat that seems as organic extraordinarily complete imagining of as it is destructive. Just as Steerpike’s Peake’s invented world. There are fires, rise in Titus Groan was a harbinger of lightning strikes, floods and dramatic unwelcome and not necessarily beneficial departures. But there is a new element, change, so his continued prominence too: a greater openness, or even directly and indirectly threatens lives, joyousness, expressed in part in the and is evidence of a shift away from the way the story moves into new country, rooted traditions of the castle. but also in the language itself. This was He doesn’t have it all his own way, perhaps born from the fact that it was though, and faces genuine threats to his written during his happiest years, in Sark own life on several occasions as his plotting after the War. This, added to the uniquely destroys more and more of the crumbling strange atmosphere he created and world of the castle. But in determining maintained, earned the novel the Royal his own rise to power, Steerpike is setting Society of Literature’s Award and the himself against his Lord, Titus, who feels Heinemann Award for Literature, which trapped and oppressed by the rituals of also recognised a collection of Peake’s his position.